Showing posts with label eprocurement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eprocurement. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Digital Transformation Office launches beta for their Digital Marketplace

Earlier this week the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) launched the beta version of their Digital Marketplace, a directory of vendors offering specialist digital services across a range of role categories.

The explicit reason for the Digital Marketplace was to make it easier for small and medium enterprises to engage with government, particular within large ICT projects. It is supposed to do this by allowing agencies to break down large projects into small stages which smaller companies are able to fulfil.

At this stage the Digital Marketplace is primarily a list of vendors - over 220. Most are small businesses, with a smattering of recruitment agencies (Horizon, Hudson, Randstadt, Talent International, The Recruitment Hive) and larger companies (such as Deloitte).

Right now it's possible for agencies to make both open and select requests to the list for skills via a briefing process, with additional approaches to market, such as an ideation approach both for buyers (roughly 'I have this problem, how would you solve it') and sellers (roughly 'I have this idea to solve a government problem - will anyone fund the work'), still under development.

The beta allows for fourteen role categories, covering a wide range of skills in the digital area, with more to come as the marketplace beds down and grows. The current roles are close to the DTO's core business of promoting and incubating digital transformation, which seems a reasonable place for them to start.

While the marketplace provides the information in a different way to most government procurement panels, it is governed in the same way - under a standing contract arrangement. At this stage all the innovation is at the front end and it will be interesting to see whether other agencies with whole-of-government panels (particularly Human Services and Immigration) see value in this way of displaying vendors and in the additional features the DTO plans for the site.

I've had a good look through the initial Digital Marketplace - in fact I'm affiliated with one of the participating vendors (as would be most private sector digital people in Canberra) - and it was interesting to see how many companies claim to have access to talent that government needs in the digital space.

Most government panels have been far more restrictive in the number of vendors they allow on the list, which has led to significant 'horse trading' of panel access and the development of services like SME Gateway to facilitate companies without a panel presence, whereas the DTO has gone for a 'bucket list' of any company that can demonstrate they meet the required criteria.

I've done a little analysis of the vendors in the Digital Marketplace and found a few interesting insights as to the responses the DTO received.

Firstly, half the approved vendors offer four or fewer of the fourteen role categories in the marketplace, with only 8% (generally recruitment companies) offering the full 14.


This suggests a lot of specialist providers have joined the service - companies which may otherwise struggle to meet procurement requirements without extensively partnering or contracting their services through larger providers.

The most popular role offered by vendors was Business Analyst, provided by 123 (or 55%), whereas the least popular was Ethical Hacker, provided by only 51 vendors (23%), followed by Inclusive Designer (Accessibility Consultant) by 58 (26%) of vendors.

This isn't surprising. Business Analyst is a standard role that has been around for a long time in ICT, whereas Ethical Hacker is relatively new as a role type and Accessibility remains an underrated area by government (with many practitioners struggling to find sufficient paying work).

It was interesting how many vendors offered personnel in the Digital Transformation Advisor role, which was second behind Business Analyst (113 vendors or 51%) despite being a very new role type.

I'm still sifting through the data and expect to find more interesting insights - particularly from the pricing (for which the DTO has published the ranges by role). This was an interesting decision by the DTO as it may encourage organisations to migrate pricing from below the given range upwards, and once in the range toward its top.

A lot of the data exposed in the marketplace has commercial significance, so I may not be able to share all of it, but the site is already gold for organisations seeking to understand the landscape servicing government. Couple the information in the site with industry knowledge and published tender amounts and it becomes relatively easy to identify the high and low price vendors.

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Saturday, May 22, 2010

App My State a major Victorian Gov 2.0 success

Victoria's App My State competition has now closed to entries, and has already been an enormous success for the Gov 2.0 efforts in that state.

The competition attracted 171 entries, 75 applications and 96 ideas, over 12 weeks.

Judging has now commenced - with the public able to vote for the 'popular choice' award and other awards now being considered by judges, with winners announced on 7 June.

The Premier has personally tweeted his thanks, showing a level of high-level engagement with the competition,

@vicpremier: Well done to all the @appmystate applicants. Top quality entries. Looking forward to giving out the awards. JB

Regardless who wins the competition, the event has already proven to be a highly cost-effective method to gather useful ideas and generate meaningful approaches to using public sector data.

Is this a once-off success? The evidence argues otherwise.

NSW is in the process of holding a similar competition with a similar level of prizes. While the competition didn't include an ideas category (EDIT 24/5/10: the competition did include an ideas category, which received 64 submissions) and occurred during a changeover in Premiers and with significantly less online promotional support, it still attracted 55 app entries over a 14 week period.

App competitions in the UK and US have also generated significant returns for governments - in particular the first Apps for Democracy competition in Washington D.C. estimated that the value of the apps produced was over US$2.2 million, for less than US$100,000 in prize value.

There is even a set of guidelines on how to run an apps competition to support agencies and states produced by Apps for Democracy.

Below I've included a video where Victorian political leadership introduce the App My State competition. Below that is a list of some of the other App competitions that have been run worldwide.



Apps competitions
Involving public sector data - there are many other examples in commercial spaces.

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Friday, March 20, 2009

The power of raw government data

In the US President Obama's newly appointed (and first) Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra has committed to finding new ways to make government data open and accessible.

The Computer World article, First federal CIO wants to 'democratize' U.S. government data, discusses how,

In a conference call with reporters, Kundra said he plans to create a Web site called Data.gov that would "democratize" the federal government's vast information resources, making them accessible in open formats and in feeds for developers.

He also said he hopes to use emerging technologies like cloud computing to cut the need for expensive contractors who often end up "on the payroll indefinitely."
These are not idle words from a political appointee - Kundra, who I have mentioned previously, is well-known amongst egovernment practitioners around the world for his innovative work in pushing the boundaries of egovernment as the District of Columbia's CTO.

Politicians often have reservations about releasing raw data, despite being collected using public funds, due to perceived concerns that the data might be used to politically damage their reputations.

Similarly government departments often restrict the release of raw data due to concerns over how it may be reused or misused.

In Australia we even go to the extent of copyrighting government data. In the US most data, publications and other tools created by their Federal government are copyright free.

However with the US's moves the debate will soon shift to the disadvantages of not allowing free access to most raw government data.

As history has recorded, countries that remove barriers to the free flow of ideas and information develop faster, are economically more successful and their people enjoy higher standards of living.

Fostering innovation directly leads to national success.

So in a world where some countries make data freely available, how do other nations continue to compete?

To draw an analogy from the publishing world, Wikipedia disrupted the business model for Encyclopedia Britannica. By providing free 'crowd-sourced' information of greater depth and about the same accuracy as a highly expensive product, Britannica has been struggling to survive for years.

After trialing a number of different protective business models to sustain its existence, but protect its data, Encyclopedia Britannica has finally adopted one that might work - it has opened its articles up to 'crowd-sourcing', accepting suggestions which are then reviewed and acted on by its professional editors - a step towards openness. Visit the Britannica blog to learn how to suggest changes to the encyclopedia.

In other words, you cannot beat openness with secrecy - the only way to remain successful is to step towards openness yourself.

This really isn't news. Many have talked about the need for greater openness of government data before. I've even mentioned it myself once or twice.

To finish, I thought I'd flag this recent talk given by Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the world wide web) at TED on the need for open data. It has some points worth reflecting on.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Involved in eProcurement? European eprocurement forum looking to build international ties

The European eProcurement forum (an initiative supported by the European Commission) is seeking to build international ties to improve its understanding and build collective knowledge about what is occuring in the eprocurement field, what works and what doesn't work in different jurisdictions around the world.

If you're involved or interested in eprocurement, check them out at the eProcurement Forum community.

Also of interest is the new eProcurement Map released by the forum, which is a map of activities having an impact on the development of European interoperable eProcurement solutions.

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